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by phillipcarter 999 days ago
FWIW part of the reason you're seeing that is, at least traditionally, APM companies rebranding as Observability companies stuffed trace data into metrics data stores, which becomes prohibitively expensive to query with custom tags/attributes/fields. Newer tools/companies have a different approach that makes cost far more predictable and generally lower.

Luckily, some of the larger incumbents are also moving away from this model, especially as OpenTelemetry is making tracing more widespread as a baseline of sorts for data. And you can definitely bet they're hearing about it from their customers right now, and they want to keep their customers.

Cost is still a concern but it's getting addressed as well. Right now every vendor has different approaches (e.g., the one I work for has a robust sampling proxy you can use), but that too is going the way of standardization. OTel is defining how to propagate sampling metadata in signals so that downstream tools can use the metadata about population representativeness to show accurate counts for things and so on.
1 comments
_moog 998 days ago
> Newer tools/companies have a different approach that makes cost far more predictable and generally lower.

What newer tools/companies are in this category? Any that you recommend?

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hooverd 998 days ago
I haven't used anything else, but I'll gladly shill for https://honeycomb.io.
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mikeshi42 998 days ago
I think we fit in that bucket [1] - open source, self-hostable, based on OpenTelemetry and backed by Clickhouse DB (columnar, not time-series).

Clickhouse gives users much greater flexibility in tradeoffs than either a time-series or inverted-index based store could offer (along with S3 support). There's nothing like a system that can balance high performance AND (usable) high cardinality.

[1] https://github.com/hyperdxio/hyperdx

disclaimer (in case anyone just skimmed): I'm one of the authors of HyperDX

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makeavish 998 days ago
Companies like https://signoz.io/ are Opentelemetry native and have very transparent approach to predictable pricing. You can self host easily as well.
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